All Hands on the Two Hands Project — June 5, 2011

A while ago, I mentioned that I had taken over editing of the Two Hands Project, a documentary about Hackerspaces that had been filmed in September of 2009. This was met with excitement from all sides, both the original filmmakers and from myself, because editing is lots of fun. I dumped all the tapes from the collection I was sent, and put up a pile of screenshots from them.

So, here it is a few months later. I just wanted to mention another milestone – basically all the footage is now up at archive.org, a little more than 40 hours of interviews, shot footage and video whatnot related to this project. It’s also a critical step in my bringing data to the Internet Archive because I burned up the wires doing file uploads for the first 20 hours of footage, which took quite a long time – but thanks to attaching a USB drive directly to one of the machines in the matrix, the 25+ remaining hours were added in an evening. That bodes well for future large-scale additions.

You can either come in through the front door or you can skip ahead to where the footage is, and browse around. Pretty much all of it derived, which means you can play the video in your browser or download modified versions. (A few didn’t, mostly related to tape corruption, although a hearty soul like myself may re-render the stuff so you can play it.)

Next will be describing the videos, which will change the titles (the titles come from handscrawled labels on the tapes, and don’t always reflect what’s actually in the footage), and then adding descriptions or metadata as I can. I’m always up for people sending in corrections or additions for the tapes.